Hackensack, NJ, Spring 1920 Photo X1628, DL&W Company Photo Collection, Steamtown NPS.
Ray Breyer submitted a neat blog post based upon the freight cars and details in a single image. Read further for a look into the past. Click on any image here to review a larger size. Model references are for HO scale products.
The above photo is a great snapshot of 1920s “real world” railroading, and offers a great peek into the fabric of railroading from almost 100 years ago. Between all of the juicy freight car detailing ideas and the general clutter around the yard shanty, there should be more than enough to keep any early prototype railroad modeler happy.
Context is always important when viewing photographs. The old adage that “a photo is worth 1000 words” is nice enough, but doesn’t say whether those words are truthful or lies. Knowing WHY is as important as knowing what. Let’s see if this photo is really telling us anything useful or not from a variety of perspectives.
Trainfest was recently held in Milwaukee and a number of new model railroad products were announced. Of particular interest is an HO scale model that should become a favorite of anyone modeling the 1910-1950 time span. Accurail has announced a 36-foot, double-sheathed box car addition to their line. The model is mainly inspired by a 1914 New York Central box car design, similar to the above image. There will be a few variations available with different ends and center sills. Here’s the Accurail announcement as a PDF.
The last couple of posts have focused on resources available here on the blog to assist modelers with a focus on 1920s and 1930s freight car fleets. While enjoying my morning coffee, I was reviewing images on a photo archive and realized how much I’ve learned from this resource and realized it hasn’t been promoted as much as other sites. There are great photo archives available on line with thousands of images that date to the first four decades of the Twentieth Century. The Library of Congress has a Mother Lode of images, many of which have been enhanced and posted at the Shorpy site. Several cities and libraries have extensive online digital archives; the Denver Public Library, Historic Pittsburgh, Cleveland Memory Project, West Virginia History on View, and the Vancouver Public Library, to name a few.
The Erie Lackawanna Railroad Historical Society has been posting several images a day from an extensive negative collection for the last few years. The images were taken in the Teens by a company photographer to document accident scenes and places along the right-of-way. Many images capture the railroad traversing a rural scene, while others show the hum and bustle of a small town or larger city. Vintage freight cars can be seen in many of these photos, along with vintage signs, homes, commercial structures, and industries. For a modeler of the Teens through the 1940s, the images are pure gold as they are filled with details that can be implemented along our model right-of-ways and towns. The images are like a window back in time that offer a glimpse of homes and small industries before they were leveled as towns grew with population increases. It was a time when the railroads were moving goods to serve communities and transport people to places near and far. Anytime I view images like these, an old indie rock tune, “Places That Are Gone,” by Tommy Keene starts playing in my head.
The details seen on many of these images inspire our hobby efforts no matter the scale, era, or gauge of our model railroads. I encourage you to visit the Erie Lackawanna Photo Archive regularly and make new discoveries among these century old photos.
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In 1917, the US government formed the United States Railway Administration to control the nations railroads during World War One. In that process, several freight car designs were approved and 100,000 cars were built and assigned to many US railroads. These five USRA freight car designs ushered in standardized freight car design for many railroads and made up about four to five percent of the overall national freight car fleet in the 1920s and 1930s.
Models of these prototypes have been available in several scales for model railroaders. The USRA freight cars have been frequently noted in the hobby press and several articles have been published over the years. Many of these articles reference a 1973 historical summary published by James E. Lane. This has been out of print for years and many of the magazine articles that referenced Lane’s work are also out of print.
As a resource for all model railroaders, I have transcribed the data from Lane’s work into tables for easy reference. This is available as the USRA Freight Car Assignments page of this blog for easy access. The information presented on that page reflects the USRA assignments which differed from the original USRA allotments. Read through the opening paragraphs to gain an understanding of these terms.
I hope readers will enjoy these details and use the USRA Freight Car Assignments page to further their prototype modeling efforts.
B&O Freight House, Wheeling, W. Va. Image from the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, HAER WVA, 35-WHEEL, 4
Recent Internet searches have led me to a new string of customers that were served by the Wheeling Freight Terminal. It seems wrong to call these the product of a search as I actually just stumbled into related details. Note the tall buildings in the background of the image above. These structures constituted a block that all had docks along the tail track that accessed the team yard. I had wondered about these buildings before, but there was little info at hand when the layout was being designed in 2012. Click on any image here to review a larger size.
